Doraemon Movie 18: Nobita no Nejimaki City Boukenki

My overall take: Built on many intriguing concepts, but doesn't always follow up on them in a satisfying way.

In this movie, Nobita and his friends populate a planet with sentient toys. This movie is a milestone, because it is the final Doraemon movie that the manga author Fujiko F. Fujio worked on before he passed. In fact, he apparently collapsed while drawing the manga that this film was based on, and the rest of the story had to be completed by his company, Fujiko Pro. Without speculating on exactly how that affected the development of this movie, I do feel that Nobita and the Spiral ... City sets up many interesting concepts—for example, the toy civilization that the main characters create, the fact that the planet is apparently populated by sentient plants, and the mysterious shapeshifting golden statue that is eventually revealed to be the creator of all life(?!)—but doesn't always tie them together in a satisfying manner by the end.

Much of how the plot is ultimately resolved here seems to borrow heavily from previous Doraemon movies. Shizuka's kindness inspiring an antagonist to act in favor of the heroes at a critical moment? Nobita reuniting with Doraemon using Doraemon's Spare Pocket? The villain leader being defeated by Nobita's sharpshooting skills? All story beats that we've seen before. Perhaps one of the more original moments in the second half of this movie is when a plush monkey sneaks back to Earth with Doraemon's Key of Life and grants sentience to several inanimate objects that don't quite fit in with the toys, such as a model skeleton from a school science lab. (Unfortunately, the movie leaves out one of the funniest new allies that the monkey recruited in the manga: a propaganda poster for a politician!)

The confrontation with the villains drags on for a while considering that they're a group of regular humans without superpowers or futuristic technology, who probably could have been easily dealt with using Doraemon's gadgets. In fact, once the main characters are prepared to face them, the villains are defeated pretty handily, even with barely any gadgets involved. Until then, however, the story goes out of its way to produce circumstances in which the villains would be a threat, at one point forcing the main characters to work with them in an uneasy alliance. Although this could have been an interesting narrative angle to take, it mostly comes across as contrived in practice.